I am not a fan of the new healthcare reform bill.
Let me start off by saying that requiring me to purchase health insurance is unconstitutional. This provision was put in place to prevent people from riding along without paying for insurance, then purchasing it when they needed it (because, in theory, they can no longer be denied because of a pre-existing condition), but the resulting requirement of mandatory health insurance is obscene. This very debacle casts a dubious light on the concept of health insurance in the first place. Let's break it down. Insurance is, by its origin and nature, a for-profit endeavor. What this "health care reform" bill has done is not fix health care, but force the nation to completely rely on an industry that ONLY exists for profit. It is because of the greed of the health insurance industry that actual health care costs so much in the first place, and now they are the ultimate gatekeepers of health services and their related costs.
In addition to the havoc wreaked on the financial lives of hundreds of millions of people, health insurance companies are now trying to wiggle through loopholes caused by unspecific wording in the bill to prevent needing to provide insurance to those who may cost them most money. They are not, however, trying to prevent the inevitable surge of insurance customers they will receive. Though we would like to believe that both sides of the aisle (or at least one) were acting on behalf of the American public, this is beginning to sound like an agreement heavily influenced by a private industry. This is no different than wording your own compromise, reaching a deal, then pointing out the inspecificity of the portions that you compromised on. Once again, the American public has been played for a fool.
If you're going to socialize medicine, then fucking socialize it. I have no problems with this notion. The government should provide services that the private sector cannot be relied upon to do. Private companies do not own our roads or our water, and for good reason. The right to a healthy life is one of those unalienable, natural rights we humans theoretically possess and since the private sector has proven incompetent in handling health, I see no problem with the government stepping in and providing their own version. If this puts insurance companies out of business, why should we care? If anything, it would serve as evidence that their business was built on an anti-competitive model, relying on the monopoly provided to them by the legislature that they lobbied for in the first place. I have no sympathy for private enterprise that uses the government as a tool against its own consumers.
Even a public option or a single-payer model would have been a better path. If people are worried about waiting in line, imagine worrying about getting care at all. I remain uninsured. The cost of insurance has not gone down and it won't as long as the entire industry is managed by a purely for-profit endeavor. There is a scenario that I play out in my head frequently: I get injured and have to go to the hospital. The resulting bill is obscenely large; for not more than a few hours and a few procedures, I am billed in excess of $15,000. This would, undoubtedly, cripple the savings I have built up over the last 9 months that I intend to go toward my future. Now, I expect the following response: "You should have gotten insurance." Should have, right? Surely, I am to blame. It's like purchasing a bucket of lottery tickets every round, and hitting the jackpot simply means that I don't lose the rest of the money I haven't given away. There are better ways to live and other countries prove it.
I'm not here to argue about capitalism and what would happen if... My argument is very simple: US health care sucks and it has not gotten better. While politicians jerk themselves off, my situation has not changed. In 2014, it will get worse if I don't have employer-provided insurance yet. The American public has been played like a fiddle on both sides. The "conservatives" thought they were fighting some great war against socialism while they sold themselves out as pawns in a corporation's lobby game. The "liberals" have been sold a bill that has been spun to read like a revolution, but in fact balks when you ask it to do something worthwhile. I don't know where I would stand along the spectrum, but you can count me as someone who is not impressed at all by the banal political theater surrounding this ghastly patchwork of legislature. The Republicans and Democrats, bound in their eternal struggle against each other, have let the real enemy, greedy insurance, slip away with the money sack.
4 nibbles: